A progressive story of one individual seen as a memory from an outside perspective.
James Joyce was an Irish novelist and poet, considered to be one of the most influential writers in the modernist avant-garde of the early 20th century. Joyce was born to a middle class family in Dublin, where he excelled as a student at the Jesuit schools Clongowes and Belvedere, then at University College Dublin. In his early twenties he emigrated permanently to continental Europe, living in Trieste, Paris and Zurich. Though most of his adult life was spent abroad, Joyce’s fictional universe does not extend far beyond Dublin, and is populated largely by characters who closely resemble family members, enemies and friends from his time there.
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man is a semi-autobiographical novel by James Joyce, that follows the intellectual and religo-philosophical awakening of Stephan Dedalus as he begins to question and rebel against the Catholic and Irish conventions with which he has been raised. The awakening of the main character comes forward with a strong moral struggle and a remarkable evolution. In fact, the novel is a Bildungsroman, meaning that it brings a major evolution over the main character, Stephan, who is also an alter-ego of the author.
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man is written into a free indirect speech, meaning that Joyce weaves together the subjectivism and the objectivism that arises from storytelling a psychological plot. The connection between Joyce and his character helps the story and gives a strong sense of authenticity. Joyce stays behind the text and outlines the psycho-moral struggles. He uses a method of involuntary remembrance that brings back memories based on an affective attitude. Joyce uses a third-person narrative that allows a close examination over the plot, Stephan being nothing more than a premise, a base on which the author creates his novel. Nevertheless, Stephan’s role to the novel is essential, in order to delimit literature from biography.
The social environment is subordinated to a psychological space. In fact, all the “outside” events are marked by the inner world of the character. The spiritual condition is often similar to the influential agents from the exterior. Stephan’s heart beats in the rate of his universe. The narrative has the same peace as the Stephan’s inner world.
“I will tell you what I will do and what I will not do. I will not serve that in which I no longer believe, whether it calls itself my home, my fatherland, or my church: and I will try to express myself in some mode of life or art as freely as I can and as wholly as I can, using for my defense the only arms I allow myself to use — silence, exile, and cunning.”
The intellectual and moral awakening of Stephan is the main theme of the novel. The individual is marked by a strong yearning to be free as he slowly discovers a world where he takes a more and more important part. From beginning to end, Stephan moves from a shy, dull and conventional character towards a free, mature individual capable of making decisions, of taking his fate into his own hands, fact supported by the final decision of leaving Ireland in order to pursue his artistic goal into a more libertine Europe.
This classic novel is considered by many to be among Joyce’s finest work!
Indeed it is…